Kenneth White is a
poet, scholar and writer: see -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_White
He has been described as Britain’s greatest living poet, yet few
know his name or his work. He was born in Glasgow, but, years ago, moved to
France where he now lives and works. Much of his writing is in French, with some
English translations. He set up the International Institute of
Geopeotics in 1989 to promote research into what has been called ‘the
cross-cultural, transdisciplinary field of study which he had been
developing during the previous decade.’ His work is exhilarating,
intriguing, touching experience broadly, lightly, but with a depth
and resonance. It has a true Scottish openness about it – frank,
full, joyous, caring, and sincere. The following set of quotes have
been taken from the reading of his writings on his travels; Kenneth
White Travels in the Drifting Dawn Penguin London 1990. The
chosen passages touch on his interests that have ramifications for
architects too, should any pause to think, reflect and consider.
p.69
But I’ll still
continue to travel a step at a time, believing that the ‘paradise’
comes out of the most ordinary reality, and out of ‘normal’
states. Less spectacular maybe, but more lasting; less intense, but
with greater density.
p.128
The search for a
place of concentration, that’s what my travelling is all about, my
writing, my travelling-writing is one indivisible process, because I
don’t hold much with a thinking from which the body is absent.
The centre is where
I space myself out.
p.77
In the woods, a blue
and gold morning. Beech, oak and pine – a great coloured, trembling
ecstasy. Smoky sunlight. Sound of waters. The chack-chack of a
blackie. Red leaves of the beech thick on the earth.
Wood-silence, big
fertility, gloriousness. Great rounded boulders. Rich water-sound of
life flowing deep in the silence. And grotesque, sap-filled roots
heaving up out of the pungent earth.
Five hours in the
woods.#
Then back into them
in the evening.
Red ground. Night
gathering. Watching the lovely madness of the river, the water coming
blackly pulsing and purling in the slits and holes among the rocks.
#
There
was a path there that particularly attracted me. I later found it
described in Senancour’s Obermann: ‘There’s a path I
like to follow; it describes a circle like the forest itself . . . it
seems to have no end; it goes through everything and arrives at
nothing; I think I could walk this path all my life.’
p.132
Back in Scotland .
. . some kind of a reckoning and an accounting I suppose is called
for . . . , but we won’t make it circumstantial, no, we won’t
make a day’s work of it, we’ll just let it come as it likes, out
of the rain . . . ‘All our troubles,’ as Gogol’s madman says, ‘
stem from the mistaken notion that thoughts originate in the brain,
whereas, in fact, thoughts are not born in the brain, no, not at all,
they are blown in from somewhere around the Caspian Sea.’
p.134
Not knowing where
you are, who you are, in order to get into the nowhere, the
no-who-where, and let the essential images come. Sitting here
fingering a piece of purple coral from the beach a few miles away.
Aloneness, with glimpses of grey seal, heron, bog-cotton in the wind.
Outside in the greyness, if you listen, listen, in addition to the
curlew’s ripple, the yelp-yelp of the redshank and the sempiternal
ka-gaya-ka of the gull. To know how to sink deep into that
aloneness.
p.135
But nothing can grow
in money. Offices and hotels. A place defined only by cash. Let
Glasgow flourish, b’jees – the damned place is booming (big deal,
big deal), but not blooming (two or three tubfuls of geraniums thrown
to the pedestrians don’t mean a thing). The future, a flyover.
Remember St Enoch’s? Remember? Remember? Remember? No use going
over to Crown Street, nobody there any more. A sterile, desiccated
purgatory (no wonder the seven-day licence has such significance):
p.129
Sitting on the
shingle-line, facing the sea, remembering Baudelaire’s: ‘In
certain, almost supernatural states of mind, the entire depth of life
is revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, which one
has under one’s eyes,’ and Boethius’ definition of eternity:
‘the presence, all at once, and in measureless intensity, of
unending life.’
P.78
What interests me
about Segalen is that he seems to epitomize exactly ambitions and
desires which, though I’d have difficulty in defining the term,
seem peculiarly ‘celtic’: the search for ‘pagan’ living, and
the search for a spiritual ‘China’.
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